Page 85 of Taking Turns

“Smith?” I ask, skipping up the stairs after him. I expect him to climb up to the third floor, where my bedroom is, but he veers off the stairs at the second floor and heads to one of the guest bedrooms, flicking on the light as he enters.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I watch him as he begins to undress. He lays his coat over a chair near the window, takes off his suit coat and walks into the closet, flicking on the light.

It’s filled with his stuff.

“It’s officially Sunday, Smith. Your time is over.”

“I’m staying anyway,” he says, unknotting his tie and pulling it through his shirt collar. He hangs it on a tie rack I never even knew this closet had.

“You can’t just stay here.” I laugh. “It’s my house. And Quin and Bric will be mad.”

“Do you care?” he asks, unbuttoning his shirt. I stop caring for a second as I watch him slip the shirt down his arms. They are nice arms. And when he turns his back to me, I stare at the muscle of his shoulders.

“I do care, actually. I like this so far. I’m interested in playing along. So I don’t want to be the reason we fail.”

“We’re already failing,” he says, unbuttoning his pants and letting them drop to the floor. He stands there in his black boxer briefs. Hard. His cock is still hard and even though I shouldn’t be turned on again so soon after what we just did, I am. “Bric is telling you to cut me out. You’re trying to break the rules without breaking the rules. I’m going along—”

“You’re going along?” I ask, my voice a lot louder than his. “This whole night was practically your idea and you know it.”

“Yup,” he says. “It was my evil little plan to get you downstairs so we could fuck under the pretense we were all together.”

“Then why are you being such an asshole right now?”

“Because, Marcella,” he says, pulling on a pair of plaid pajama pants that—God help me, because it’s really not the time or place—make me chuckle a little. Smith Baldwin in pajama pants. It’s like we’ve morphed into this married couple, only someone forgot to tell me about it. “You’re playing with us, aren’t you?”

“You’re playing with me,” I say. “What’s the difference?”

“The difference is that you found us, didn’t you? I only thought I found you that night. I didn’t. You came to us. So what’s going on, Chella?”

I swallow, my throat suddenly dry. “Rochelle—”

“Fuck Rochelle,” he snaps. “No one cares about Rochelle. And don’t use her as your excuse.”

My stomach aches. A dark, cold, hard feeling sits down in the pit. Like it’s always been there, but I got used to it. And then it went away, unnoticed, but now it’s back.

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

I swallow down the sickness inside me. “I swear, I haven’t.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Then leave,” I say, standing up taller. Why should I let him know so much about me? I know nothing about him, other than he’s involved in some pretty sick shit.

“I live here now.”

“What?” I laugh, but it’s not funny. “You don’t.”

He walks out of the closet, flicking the light off as he passes me, walks over to the switch on the wall, flicks the other lights off as well, and then gets into bed.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Go to bed, Marcella. We had a nice time tonight and it was clever, right?” He stares at me in the darkness, his face just barely visible in the dim moonlight filtering in from outside. “We got what we wanted and we didn’t cheat.”

“Didn’t we? If we were being honest we would’ve told Quin and Bric we were there.”

He says nothing, He just smiles.

“Why are you staying here?” I ask.